We Recommend WordPress for Small Business

Episode 3:Here at LocalNa8ion we endorse WordPress as the best content management system for the small to medium sized business. Not just for your blog, but for use in publishing your main web site.

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p>It’s FREE, easy to use and update, has more built-in Local SEO Goodness than any comparable product, and you can use it to power your regular web site, not just a blog.

That’s why Local Na8ion runs our web siteand our Local Marketing Blog for SME’s on WordPress and others like The New York Times and other prominent media and content companies publish all kinds of content on WordPress.

Did we mention that WordPress has an active community of over 10,000 contributors? They’re busy year-round making new theme designs that you can use on your site (most are free to use) along with adding specialty features and functionality (called plug-ins in WordPress) that do everything from power a job board, help you run a newspaper, or make the SEO goodness in WordPress even better.

11 Responses to "We Recommend WordPress for Small Business"

I also recommend it for my small business clients. However, there are some issues that make it less-than-ideal:
1) WordPress updating isn’t for beginners – you need to know how to FTP, etc.
2) The visual editor isn’t rock-solid, causing you to need to know more about HTML than necessary (to work in the code editor),
3) Support by community can sometimes be frustrating

FTP (file transfer protocol for uploading files to your web site) can definitely be intimidating for new users but once they’ve seen it they realize it’s not hard to master. For those interested, here’s an 8 minute lesson I found about FTP on YouTube. I’ve trained luddites on how to do far worse on computers when I was a corporate trainer. 🙂 I guess I see the glass half full on this one. Most of the FTP work can be avoided fortunately. Images can be uploaded for example in the visual WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor.

On the subject of updating to new versions of WordPress (as you pointed out this requires using FTP) there’s a new plugin for WordPress that auto-updates your WordPress site to the newest version. The plugin is from Techie Buzz and here’s the link to the plugin called WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I’m not going to recommend it yet because I have not tried it but it’s worth a look. Also, some hosts now do the upgrading for you and I expect this to become more common.

Support for WordPress in my opinion is better than any comparable web publishing system (barring paid live application support) but I’ve found that it’s better to use your search engine of choice then to muck about on the actual WordPress help forums. Just search on Yahoo! or Google and someone will have an answer to your question…usually posted on a blog.

Finally, good point you make on the visual editor being weak in some areas. The main problem I’ve encountered with the visual WYSIWYG editor comes in inserting YouTube or other videos in your page/post that use the embed HTML tag. Sorry for the geek speak.